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Year-in and year-out, one of the more reliable crowd-pleasers at the Toronto International Film Festival is its Midnight Madness program. Since 1988, Midnight Madness has offered a kind of counterprogramming to the more, um, respectable festival entries, featuring a collection of more genre fair — usually that means horror but there’s also been room for dark action and twisted comedy. Some of its highlights over the years have been the horror classic Candyman, the early Russell Crowe flick Romper Stomper, Peter’s Jackson’s infamous Meet the Feebles, and in recent years Insidious, You’re Next, and last year’s indie horror breakout It Follows.

This year’s Midnight Madness program offered yet another buffet of intriguing options, and with limited time slots available —navigating the TIFF lineup is always a series of compromises and concessions— I made some decisions based on past performance and a little bit of intrigue.

Green Room

Director Jeremy Saulnier’s previous film, Blue Ruin, wasn’t a horror flick, but instead a modest revenge story in which none of the revenging ever went according to plan or felt as cathartic as the movies have suggested that it must. There are elements of that kind of messiness in Green Room, which sees a fledgeling (and even that’s being generous) punk band — among them Anton Yelchin and Alia Shawkat — show up for a gig at a rural venue that turns out to be a neo-Nazi joint. As tends to happen in movies like these, something horrific happens, setting off a chain of events and a stand-off between the band and the skinheads (led by Patrick Stewart of all people!).

As a horror film, Green Room is definitely more siege than slasher, with the tension building as the band members (plus a wrong-place-wrong-time Aryan girl played by Imogen Poots) try to work out a scenario that doesn’t end with them murdered and placed out by the side of the road so it looks like an accident. It’s not a perfect film. While Poots and a well-cast Yelchin are good, the Patrick Stewart thing is probably a case of too-ambitious casting; he’s never quite believable in the role (or in the accent, yeesh), but Saulnier once again makes the raggedness of the punks’ escape into a thrilling game of hey-maybe-this-will-work. It’s a good time, and as the opening night film, the Midnight Madness crowd ate it up.

The Devil’s Candy

Aussie director Sean Byrne had a huge hit at Midnight Madness in 2009 with The Loved Ones, a rather nasty little tale of a deranged high-school girl who victimized handsome prom-king types that managed to win me over despite being repulsed by it as often as I was riveted. When you’re into horror, there’s something to be said about being in the hands of a director with whom you feel genuinely unsafe, and The Loved Ones had that.

I was looking for that same quality in The Devil’s Candy, an American-set film that sets up like many a Poltergeist or Amityville Horror before it. A happy family (Ethan Embry, Shiri Appleby, and their daughter Kiara Glasco) moves into a new house that was vacated because an elderly couple were murdered by their mentally-disturbed adult son (a terrifying if stereotype-supporting Pruitt Taylor Vince, every bit the track-suited menace straight out of America’s nightmare vision of fat people). Vince’s character hears the devil’s voice in his head, and pretty soon, Embry hears it too, and we can all see where this is going, especially once Embry begins painting terrifying tableaus about child murders out in the barn.

There’s a lot of affect to this movie. Embry and Glasco’s characters are into heavy metal, and there’s a distorted-guitar effect that becomes a motif throughout the film. Ultimately, eventually, I got what I wanted. Byrne’s willingness to take the story farther than you think he will sooner than you think he will creates yet again the feeling that this director means you harm, and since the actors have made you care about their characters, it’s all pretty scary … at times. Then the death-metal aesthetic asserts itself again, and the spell gets broken. Kind of like how, if you’re not into metal, the hyper-aggressive posturing of its culture can seem incredibly silly? That, but in horror-movie form.

The Final Girls

The closing-night Midnight Madness film turned out to be not only the best of the bunch (that I got to see, at least), but also one of my favorite films of the whole festival. The premise — from screenwriters M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller — is classic meta horror: a group of friends, among them a girl (Taissa Farmiga) whose dead mother (Malin Akerman) used to star in slasher flicks, go to a revival showing of Camp Bloodbath, only to be transported INTO the film because: reasons. The execution — from director Todd Strauss Schulson — is some of the most creative and tonally nimble horror comedy I’ve seen in a bit. The world inside the movie is improbably bright and candy-colored (very Dorothy-in-Oz) and the movie characters are exaggeratedly friendly. Which makes the presence of the Jason Vorhees knock-off Billy Murphy both more and less scary. This is definitely more of a comedy than it is a horror movie, but I can’t imagine horror fans not being delighted by the joy with which The Final Girls plays around with their beloved genre.

The cast is just about perfect. Along with Farmiga, the kids transported into the movie are played by Alia Shawkat (again — she’s the Alicia Vikander of Midnight Madness), Alexander Ludwig, Nina Dobrev, and Silicon Valley‘s Thomas Middleditch, who is an absolute all-star; as the camp counselors inside the movie, there’s Akerman, Adam DeVine, Tory Thompson, The Carrie Diaries‘ Chloe Bridges (Donna LaDonna rides again!), and Angela Trimbur, who you might remember from a little show called Road Rules, and whose recognition as such remains my personal TIFF triumph of 2015.

The sneaky brilliance of Fortin and Miller’s script is that amid all the silliness and knowing nods to the slasher-flick industry, he’s building to a payoff with some genuine heart. It feels like a sneak attack, that by the end Farmiga and Akerman’s characters are coming to this emotionally affecting payoff. That the movie pivots off of that into a corker of a climax, followed by some killer comedy just before the credits, is all the better. As a movie, it’s a promising bit of horror fan-service. As a viewing experience, which is what Midnight Madness promises every year, it was superb.

Joe Reid (@joereid) is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. You can find him leaving flowers for Mrs. Landingham at the corner of 18th and Potomac.

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